Why the Wright brothers?

Published: May 23, 2003 8:00PM

WASHINGTON With the 100th anniversary of the Wright brothers history-making flight at Kitty Hawk, N.C., approaching in December 2003, National Geographic in collaboration with the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, in publishing a book commemorating the lives and achievements of these renowned aeronautical pioneers.

The Wright Brothers and the Invention of the Aerial Age (National Geographic Books, ISBN 0-7922-6985-3, May 2003, $35) by Tom Crouch and Peter Jakab, senior staffers at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum and two of the worlds leading experts on Wilbur and Orville Wright.

In this definitive, richly illustrated book, with its many rarely published archival photographs, Crouch and Jakab answer the questions: Why did the Wrights triumph over other aeronautical pioneers in a fiercely competitive arena? How did these two modest small businessmen, owners of a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio, working essentially alone, with little technical training, solve the complex problem of controlled, powered, heavier-than-air flight that had defied better known experimenters for centuries?

The answer lies in the brothers comprehension of the barriers to mechanical flight and their design solutions to overcome them.

The Wrights were the inventors of the airplane because they approached the problem with an effective methodology that was undergirded by a number of innate skills, engineering techniques and personality traits that were especially conducive to technical creativity, write Crouch and Jakab.

Fascinated by flight since childhood when their father gave them a toy helicopter, the Wrights realized that an airplane capable of controlled flight under its own power needed to be a series of distinct mechanical and structural entities wings, an engine, and a means of controlling and balancing the aircraft that worked in unison. They also recognized that learning to pilot the aircraft was as important as building a technically successful machine.

For three years, from 1899, they constructed and flew a number of kites and gliders and conducted aerodynamic tests in a homemade wind tunnel. In 1903 they built the Flyer, their first powered airplane with propellers, an engine and a movable rudder. On Dec. 17, 1903, on the wind-swept dunes at Kitty Hawk, with 32-year-old Orville piloting, the Flyer lifted into the air for a flight that lasted 12 seconds and covered 120 feet. By noon on that historic day, the brothers had flown three more times; the final flight, by 36-year-old Wilbur, lasted 59 seconds and the plane traveled 852 feet. The aerial age was born.

In moving prose, Crouch and Jakab explain the brothers engineering accomplishments, the fame they achieved, their efforts to sell their invention to the U.S., British and French governments (unsuccessful at first because the brothers refused to give any demonstrations until they secured a patent in 1906), and the problems and business intrigues they faced. The book is a masterful portrait of two genius personalities never married, they lived together all their lives and the world of pioneering aviation in which they operated.

The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museums centennial exhibit on flight, The Wright Brothers and the Invention of the Aerial Age, will open in Washington, D.C. on Oct. 11.

Crouch, senior curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, holds degreees from Ohio University and The Ohio State University and is the author of The Bishops Boys: A Life of Wilbur and Orville Wright and numerous other books on flight.

Jakab is chairman of the aeronautics division at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. He has published two previous books about the Wright brothers. The Published Writings of Wilbur and Orville Wright, and Visions of a Flying Machine: The Wright Brothers and the Process of Invention.